Choosing to Remember

A short drive up the Thai coast from the resort island of Phuket lies a pristine, rain-forest-covered headland overlooking the Andaman Sea. This 11-hectare expanse is designated to be the site of a memorial to the victims of the tsunami, which killed as many as 8,000 people in Thailand and nearly 300,000 around the region a year ago. The memorial's design is being chosen through an international competition whose key mandates are harmony with nature, and subtlety: abstract references to the disaster are preferred to literal representations. "We didn't want any design involving waves," says one of the seven jurors, Swedish...